Employee Experience Strategy: When employees are satisfied, the business is successful!
1. Employee Experience – What is Employee Experience (EX)?
According to statistics from Deloitte’s survey of global human resource leaders and managers, 80% of participants rated EX as an extremely important factor in business. However, in the same survey, only 22% of participants said they completely understood what EX was and could distinguish it from other popular concepts. This is an extremely alarming number, especially in a context where businesses need to quickly grasp new trends.
EX is essentially an individual’s experience and interaction with a business throughout his or her employee life cycle, including 7 stages: attract – hire. ) – onboard (get a job) – engage (start working) – perform (demonstrate) – develop (develop) and finally depart (leave work). In particular, EX includes:
Procedural Employee Experience (PEX)
PEX is an employee’s actual experience of his or her work. It is closely related to the structure and way an individual handles tasks to fulfill his or her role and responsibilities. PEX is often built with the intention of optimizing the way employees engage with daily work systems and processes, giving them the flexibility to switch from one task to another, while improving speed. completion of assigned tasks.
Environmental Experience – Textural Employee Experience (TEX)
TEX represents the structure of each employee’s working environment, which includes 3 main environments:
- Physical environment: is the working space of a company, from the layout of objects to the design of the office, directly affecting the comfortable experience of employees at work.
- Technology environment: includes the technology tools and platforms that businesses provide to support employees’ work, directly affecting the efficiency and productivity of individuals and teams.
- Cultural environment: is the entire set of values, concepts, practices and traditions ingrained in the operations of a business, influencing the emotions, thinking and behavior of employees to pursue and realize common goals
Emotional Employee Experience (EEX):
EEX involves how employees think about the business, how they interact with colleagues and leaders, and how they understand and navigate their work environment. This is the most important factor of all three, determining an employee’s final assessment of whether the experience they received at the business is “good” or “bad”.
2. The importance of Employee Experience for businesses
In the current era, the majority of the workforce belongs to generation Y (Millennials, born in 1980 – 1995) who go to work not only to make money but also to satisfy their passion and aim for a balance between work and work. work-life. That’s why these young employees often become “picky” and do not easily sell their intelligence and labor cheaply. Businesses can no longer hide their shortcomings through Employer Branding strategies, or bypass candidates thanks to the ingenuity of selective recruiters. Consumerism is present in the labor market, in which new-age employees are savvy consumers, and businesses need to “satisfy” these difficult-to-please customers if they want to own their service. In addition, the working tendency of young employees often does not want to stay long term and be loyal to one employer, but they prefer to change to try new work experiences.
3, How to improve Employee Experience in business?
1, Collect and analyze employee expectations and desires: With the 3 types of feedback listed below, businesses can make accurate, objective judgments that best reflect the reality of employee aspirations, thereby building appropriate experience improvement strategies.
- Direct feedback is feedback given directly to the business by employees, through surveys or periodic meetings. This is the largest source of information a business can expect to gain, so make sure it happens regularly, on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
- Indirect feedback is feedback collected on information channels where employees regularly share their thoughts, such as social networks Facebook, Linkedin or internal communication channel Slack. Information from indirect feedback is extremely important so that businesses can control and detect changes in employees’ psychology and emotions.
- Speculative feedback is feedback that comes from employee activities and behaviors instead of words. Feedback helps businesses predict future employee behavior, thereby providing specific solutions to support them. Practical feedback can be collected through means and tools to support business operations, or through employee feedback to colleagues.
2, Design priority stages and activities in the employee life cycle:
To complete this task, the first step is for managers to identify the activities and stages that every employee must go through during their time working at the enterprise. They may include:
- Get attracted and reach out to employers
- Pre-boarding (pre-Onboarding stage)
- Onboarding
- Salary, bonus and benefits
- Learn and develop capacity
- Communicate, collaborate and engage with the community
- Rewards and recognition
- Competency assessment and job feedback
- Promote
- Quit one’s job
Then, for each identified activity and phase, based on each employee’s persona, the business needs to identify two key elements: 1) desired results from the activities/phases and 2) ) the difference between current experience and desired outcome. Thanks to this step, businesses will have access to many useful insights. For example, new employees often want to be provided with full information about the organization and people during the Pre-boarding phase to make it easier to integrate. Or evaluation and feedback are often prioritized individually to avoid conflicts and comparisons within the group. Through this amount of insight, managers can discover gaps in their current employee lifecycle, thereby providing solutions to quickly fix them. Outstanding activities will be prioritized to appear more, while annoying activities will be shortened or completely eliminated. All of these efforts are aimed at delivering impeccable employee experience and lifecycles.